Theme: Foot & mouth disease

Foot and mouth disease. Known as Koch's preparation. Serum and virus. Percentage fo salted horses. Rinderpest. Emperor's horses at Mürzsteg, lower Austria. Veterinary surgeons. Mr Henry Blackwood Price. Courteous offer a fair trial. Dictates of common sense. Allimportant question. In every sense fo the word take the bull by the horns. ...

— from Ulysses

A cab driver in Galway smiled and sighed and said, "Well, it looks like this year everyone will have a traditional St. Patrick's Day feast." By that he meant bacon and cabbage – not the corned beef often substituted. No one's eating much red meat in Ireland right now, even healthy native Irish beef. The islands are seized in an agricultural panic – an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in Britain, and one that during my visit seemed on the verge of exploding into a continental epidemic.

Foot-and-mouth disease affects cattle and sheep, causing them to break out with some sort of rash in their mouths and on their hooves, as well as somehow sickening the animal and tainting the meat. Humans apparently can't catch it, even from eating infected meat, but we can carry the virus – across borders, from farm to farm.

There was some concern whether or not we'd (a) get into Ireland at all or (b) get out. The last time an outbreak of foot-and-mouth seized the UK, back in the '20s, they closed the ports. No one in or out. No official measures have come to that thus far, though most farmers are prisoners of their own farms – self-exiled and afraid to leave for fear of picking up the virus and contaminating their entire herds. Rural kids can't leave to go to school. One news crew disinfected a camera and passed it over a fence to one such exiled farmer; he filmed the conditions inside – the cattle corpses piled in his barn, killed by order of the government, rotting and smelling. "I wish the Minister of Agriculture would come spend one night with us out here with this stench," he said. "Maybe he'd speed things up a bit."

That's all in Britain; Ireland is free of the virus – and plans to stay that way. That's why nearly every St. Patrick's Day parade and celebration was canceled, hoping to discourage tourist traffic, esp. coming from Britain. The tourism industry, you might imagine, is freaking out. As a fellow in a Galway City pub explained to me one night, "There are three industries in Ireland: agriculture, tourism and computers. The computers rebuilt the economy, but the agriculture still sustains it. If foot-and-mouth comes in, it's famine time again." A touch of hyperbole there, perhaps, but an adequate explanation of the threat of this pesky little microbe and the Draconian measures to keep Ireland green.

The spectre of foot-and-mouth shadowed us everywhere in Ireland. The airport gangplank wasn't the only place with disinfectant mats we were supposed to walk over; they were placed at the doors and entries of every public space, from the National Art Museum to the gates of St. Stephen's Green. Driving through the country, we saw signs posted on the gates of farms and at all prime photo-op turn-offs – signs asking tourists please not to stop or exit the vehicle unless absolutely necessary. Spring break was coming up in Ireland and the UK, too, and students were asked not to return to rural homes, and they did to not come back to school.

It even followed prime minister Bertie Ahern to the United States, where he was getting a half-hour audience with the little Bush kid. Ahern brought along a traditional gift: a bowl of holy shamrock. Unfortunately, the shamrock was confiscated at customs; all incoming agricultural products had to be screened for the virus. "A U.S. source of shamrock has been identified" just in case the holy weed didn't clear inspection in time, the Irish Times reported.

Every hotel and B&B we visited bemoaned the cancelations they've had for the big holiday weekend. The Evening Herald nailed a great story about legions of American high school band players who had been practicing and fund-raising for two years in order to attend that weekend's big international band contest in Limerick were distraught over the competition being canceled. It was too late for them to cancel their trip, too, so they'd be coming to Ireland anyway – with nothing to do.

The policy for dealing with the outbreak in England has boiled down to a horrifying three-word policy: slaughter on suspicion. After three days in Ireland, a news report said upwards of 74,000 animals had been slaughtered on suspicion of being infected – and by the end of the outbreak the number was expected to reach 1 million dead cows. Photos and newscasts looked like the fifth level of mammal hell – fields full of funeral pyres, cow legs sticking up rigidly from smoldering heaps. Eerie and gruesome. "No end to the 'killing fields'" was one headline.

Late in the second week, one British farmer's firearms were seized by the police; he'd been making very vocal threats against the life of the Minister of Agriculture. He was not an isolated case, however. The next day there was a report that "hundreds" of British farmers planned to resist – with fighting, if need be – any government order to slaughter their healthy livestock. "They'll have a war on their hands if they don't come up with a better way of dealing with this situation," said one farmer.

The reactions to this scorched-hide policy are interesting to watch, even in myself. The almost indiscriminate slaughter of so many cattle is painful to see, but then again, these animals were raised to be slaughtered. These aren't cows, they're meat. It's only painful to witness because we never witness it. We're getting to see them die uselessly in fields instead of with purpose in a slaughterhouse. Is that what we're upset about, that they're dying uselessly, without purpose? More likely that we're watching them die at all, something we never have the alarming luxury of doing. It certainly makes you re-examine that "purpose," not to mention your diet.

The journey:

Recurrent themes: